For some, this means that the cost of buying a home or renting an apartment has become less expensive. For others, it means the threat of eviction. At either end of the spectrum, that suggests that affordable housing isn’t affordable anymore.
Tim Surratt is a Realtor with 30 years of experience. His buyers can buy homes, but they either spend more money or buy fewer homes on the market with high demand and little inventory.
“(It occurs at) every price point,” Al-Sart said. “Affordability is getting harder and harder to find something under $300,000. You will have to go further. There is still affordable housing. You may have to go a little further or get a smaller home than you thought you might have.” “
That’s part of what researchers at Rice University’s Kinder Institute for Urban Research have found. They have published at least three studies on affordable housing in the past year. Surat sees housing in Houston as a tale of two cities.
“Housing is becoming increasingly unaffordable for a lot of people,” said Bill Fulton, director of urban research. “There are people who want to buy and people who are just trying to rent.”
The COVID-19 pandemic has certainly exacerbated the problem, Fulton said, but affordable housing has already been a problem before.
“So much rental housing was canceled during Harvey’s tenure that there was so much more competition, and people started paying more than they could afford for rental housing,” Fulton said.
This is the Guetta Stevenson experience. She lives in Fifth Ward and is part of a group of Houstonians who call their coalition Housing and Neighborhood Rights.
“If you were really in trouble during Harvey, you got hit over and over again, and you never really got any relief from the original blow,” Stephenson said.
Ruth Rundle is also a member of FHRN. Live on $800 a month. Randall is 68 and got an extra job to pay her bills and she’s still hardly surviving.
“I got another job, and I still have to pay taxes on the little money (that I earned),” Randall said. “I owe the government money (that I made).”
It’s a losing proposition for many, and that’s if they can find accommodation. The Houston Housing Authority has varied waiting lists from 8,000 to 20,000 people, all looking for help finding and maintaining affordable housing. David Northern is CEO.
“The tension is amazing,” Northern told ABC13. “After the pandemic, a lot of families are struggling with income, and rents are going up. Just right. Right now, not many landlords are willing to rent to people with affordable housing in this situation. We are constantly working on it. We have to work With our local elected officials. You have to make sure that the communities understand that people need affordable housing.”
Julia Ordona works with Texas Housers, a nonprofit organization focused on low-income housing. For every 100 families in the lowest income category, she says, there are only 19 affordable properties.
“Affordability has always been an issue and Houston specifically,” Ordona said. “It becomes a domino effect because we don’t target and serve the people most in need. We actually price them, and then the people who have units are priced because the people who work under them can only afford things that are unreasonable to them.”
Bottom line: There isn’t enough affordable housing in Southeast Texas. Whether you are talking about buying or renting a home or creating a safe and clean space to live in, there is no immediate solution. A problem in the making, exacerbated by disaster and epidemic, the hope is that market conditions are changing and politicians take action.
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